The heart is a curious thing, capable of fluttering with excitement and pangs of pain. It's said that finding love with a broken heart is a daunting task.
Arpana Pathak, a 23-year-old college graduate, in a desperate attempt to move on, tries to fo...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
This is the theme song for this chapter. Make sure to turn this on before reading :D
⁕ A r p a n a P a t h a k ⁕
'He was the person I wanted to die with' my heart knew long before my mind caught on.
I was like a blank canvas, hesitant to let anyone draw near. Perhaps Maa's stories had left their mark: 'Demons disguised as charming men preying on innocent girls.'
So when a truly charming boy entered my life, my fear grew that he might be the very demon my mother had warned about.
A U G U S T , 2 0 1 7
My heart was pounding in my chest like a bass drum as I walked onto the big campus of my new college, Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies. The bold letters on the gate felt like they were teasing me.
My hometown, Saharanpur, had been my safe place for my whole life, but I knew I needed to take a chance and go to college in a big city like Delhi. Joshi and I were lucky to get accepted into one of the most esteemed universities in the country.
She loved coding and technology so she was going for a computer science degree. And I liked Commerce, so I chose business management. It was a field that challenged and inspired me. We got into the same university but ended up in different colleges within it.
This new place felt like a confusing maze. I was anxious, my palms were sweaty, and I couldn't breathe well. I didn't want to be late for my first class, on my first day of college so I walked faster in the corridor outside the classrooms. But fate had other plans in store for me.
I accidentally bumped into a boy as I hurried past a group of students. We both fell in different directions. I made a loud noise when I hit the ground, and everyone looked at me. The boy I bumped into was so mad that he started swearing without even looking at who he had bumped into.
"Abey chutiye! Andha hai kya? Aankhe khol ke nhi....." (Hey asshole! Are you blind? Can't you keep your eyes open and...)
"What a jerk!" I muttered under my breath and tried to get up."Clearly, he's the blind one here, not me. Ugh, let it Arpana. Maybe this college is full of assholes like him."
He abruptly stopped when he saw me on the ground, groaning because of the pain. Probably he felt bad and tried to help me get up. But I didn't let him and got up on my own.
"Um, I'm really sorry," he said with a shy voice. "I didn't mean to bump into you like that."
I gave him an annoyed look and walked quickly to my class. I couldn't believe that my first day at college started with such an embarrassing thing. I felt a bit awkward when I entered. I was shy, so talking to people I didn't know was hard for me, and asking for help was even harder.
